The "value of life" for these sorts of calculations in the UK is in the region of £1.2 million. Interestingly, the rail industry is investing closer to £2 million per life saved, because of the higher profile of train crashes. Nice pegs 1 QALY(Quality Adjusted Life year) at about £30K ($4...

what was the name of the company? GSK. They were fined 3 billion in the US for hiding data, bribing doctors, and breaking marketing laws related to that drug and others. Specifically one of the issues that came up in the case was marketing to convince doctors to prescribe to children. (after they h...

Yeah, I'm pretty sure at this point you don't understand how clinical trials are run if you think this is a thing, or if you think some low budget project is the sort of thing we're talking about. We've got small projects done largely by Phd students out of my department testing interventions and I...

My understanding is that the goal is to get trials reported, not to fine companies/researchers. As a result, when a trial fails to report, the follow up is a threat of a fine to get them to. But yeah, it's a slow process and clinical-trials.gov is still playing catch up. Worth pointing out though t...

I feel like this bears repeating, because I'm not sure the point was understood - The NIH requires that all trials that involve human subjects be reported to clinicaltrials.gov. Failure to do so results in fines and potentially a loss of the ability to conduct further trials. If this results in peo...

In theory it should now be a solved problem. In theory. First, while the rules say that trials should be pre-registered in reality trials often only get registered shortly before publication, long after the trial began when they may already have had a chance to p-hack. Second, while officially there...

Yeah, that doesn't really work in countries where you have to convince a regulatory (FDA, EMA) to approve your drug. And if you're not in one of those countries, then you're not bothering to spend hundreds of millions on Phase 3 trials. Except that in the real world crap drugs still get through. Ta...

No one is going to push through something that doesn't actually do anything, knowing full well that another better drug can come in and swoop it. Drugs have been withdrawn worldwide due to simple lack of efficacy. It's what you get when drugs get pushed through on the back of crap trials. Once you'...

Outside of a purely academic context null results are in most cases not equally useful. Finding that drug X can cure Y is much more useful than finding that it can't. Ask a doctor: "do you want to know if a drug does not work?" Indeed finding out that a drug doesn't work on children or wo...

Like I said John, that post is intellectually bankrupt. Btw, why didn't you just buy a newer car shell, and a newer engine? Is it not possible due to technological advances/complexity? Seems like a good way to get some sweat equity. Um, because that would've cost me tens of thousands of dollars, as...

So I would say that though the numbers that the OP presents are surprising, each modification does not necessarily represent a malign attempt to pervert science or corruption of any other sort. Thing is, it's perfectly acceptable to add interesting findings but it's important to state clearly that ...

http://compare-trials.org/ Ben Goldacre (author of the book Bad Science) and a team recently set up a website for tracking improperly switched/unreported/added outcomes in clinical trials. Outcome switching in clinical trials is a serious problem. Between October 2015 and January 2016, the COMPare t...

Awaiting a "pants on fire" rating from politifact on this one. You have to "interpret" this really really hard to make it true like assuming that only the Gutenberg Bible counts and counting water guns as "guns". "hey man! I wanna get my hands on a book! any book! ...

I mean I suppose if you're trapped in a classroom and the shooter comes in, you're likely pretty fucked anyways. At which point it's either fight or wait for them to start shooting and then fall over near someone who had gotten shot and hope they think you're dead (and hope you're not the first one...

... is this just like yourself and like 3 other people on a blog ? Because i'm going to second this literally being the first time I've ever heard anyone imply that "full service sex workers" consider "prostitute" a slur, hell it's also the first instance of the term "full ...

This is the thing: nobody involved in the debate wants free speech shut down or silenced or whatever. That is all in people's heads. Some people are requesting that other people not be dicks, with the only consequence threatened being "if you do that anyway it makes you a dick." No, not e...

I'm hoping the RCN grows a backbone and strikes too. There's been a lot of pressure to decrease nurse staffing levels under the Tories current campaign to defund the NHS. Combined with the government attempting to kill off in-progress research on safe staffing levels because they don't want embarras...

You mean... "We've been lucky so far." This is plane vs auto-mobile logic. Lots of people are terrified of flying but they're happy to drive to the airport or even drive the journey they could have flown despite it being far more likely that they'll end up burning to death trapped in a ca...

I've read a lot of sci-fi and never encountered the idea before. Some of Le Guin's work is roughly in the same ballpark but I wouldn't really call it similar. Maybe The Culture series but none of the Culture books I've read even have humans in them yet the characters still have gender. What have yo...

Then again, real-life ministers are not usually bumbling idiots. I think that's highly debatable. The UK has had health ministers who believe homeopathy works. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tomchiversscience/100179258/jeremy-hunt-health-secretary-thinks-homeopathy-works/ One of my friends is di...

I don't recall the Radchaai repressing or persecuting anyone over their genderness. They are frequently snobbish about it in the way a more "advanced" society considers its culture clearly superior but the Radchaai are not on a crusade to eradicate the concept of genders and the cultural ...

Reading Ancillary Mercy now. Highly recommend it. People talk a lot about the gender stuff but it hasn't struck me as that strange as far as SciFi goes, though I tend to seek out stories with unusual social/gender/morality dynamics. (Greg egan, Vinge etc) The whole glove thing is almost becoming a t...

It largely comes down to different ways of viewing the system. To scientists, engineers, programmers, artists (you know useful people who create anything of value themselves) it's supposed to be a system for rewarding creators for creating useful things but they can see that it's really really shit ...

Sometimes... sometimes I wonder what it would be like to get in a time machine and go back 2 or 3 decades and present people with a mixture of real and onion news stories and try to make them guess which ended up being reality. I distinctly remember reading a jokey comment on slashdot which proposed...

In a way I think Equal Rites was sort of the first "discworld" discworld book. The color of magic and the light fantastic were mostly a D&D game put to paper but Equal Rites was the first that felt like part of the series. I honestly don't know how much of The Shepherd's Crown was Terr...

From a jurisprudence point of view: Imagine a world where a divorce can be granted without any reason being given.... Others have already pointed out that you're mistaken about the rules but to add: traditionally certain things which may not be nice still get included in the realm of "things p...

An argument might also be made that most of Middlemarch , although technically set in the real world, mostly takes place in various characters' heads, and therefore it is ultimately a fantasy novel, too. It explores the various ideas and ideals that the characters have about each other and about li...

Edit: I also wanted to note that lovers of fantasy and science fiction dismissing the classics is to some extent an understandable reaction, as a pushback against the long-repeated narrative (which thankfully is being challenged now) that fantasy and SF are not "serious literature". That'...

Re: The classics I think a lot of english-lit people view many of them through rose tinted glasses. Some, if published for the first time today, would deserve those low ratings. Some of the classics are terribly written and a chore to read compared to some more modern works. They also tend to suffer...

Further confounder may be that goodreads is fairly recent (2007 or so) so older books may be more highly rated because people who loved a book years ago are more likely to look it up and rate them while people might casually rate books published after 2007 attracting raters who are less fond of the ...

I don't have the source data files, the graph comes from this blog: http://difficultrun.nathanielgivens.com/2015/04/14/sad-puppy-data-analysis/ he may have data files available somewhere in there. It's easy, first define an objective measure for the quality of a book... oh, wait. Damn. There's no ob...

make sure to cut out 2014 and 2015 or treat them as a separate group since the puppies injected some with much higher ratings. Warbound (from the puppies slate) is that super-high rated datapoint on the top right.

Assholes stack several categories at the Hugos with works whose politics appeal to them; WorldCon attendees show up in record numbers to award those categories to nobody . That's a bit of a simplification. Prior there were some less organised similar campaigns which exploited the same weakness thou...

I think it would be kinda fun to have something like and automatic Ad Hominem highlighter/remover followed up by Automatic summarization http://curtis.ml.cmu.edu/w/courses/index.php/Detection_of_Ad_Hominem_attacks_in_blog_and_review_data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_summarization It'd be ...

I've read reddit for quite some time yet I'd never even heard of her. She wasn't particularly visible to the majority but it isn't the majority that shape most internet communities, it tends to be a small minority of people like the subreddit mods. Reddit appears to be going into a Digg spiral by al...

I am struggling to follow what you are trying to explain here. You recognize and give an example of the importance of equal protection relating to marriage. And then criticize the dissenting view for not bringing it up. But it cripples their argument so they shouldn't bring it up. Indeed I would ha...

There are safety reasons for the requirement that in today's cars there must be direct, mechanical linkages between the steering and the wheels and the brakes and the wheels. If my driverless software suffers a glitch, then without any manual backup I'm roadkill, or someone else is. Big solar flare...